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Help Desk

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) About AVweb

Baffled by something on AVweb? We've put together this list of common troubleshooting and known issues to help you out. Just click on each question to view our detailed answers  and if you can't find an answer to your question here, contact us using the form to your right.

REGISTRATION/LOGIN

AVweb is absolutely free to users, and you can browse the site as much as you like without registering. You will find, however, that some of our services do require you to create a free membership account. There are several reasons for this:

Member profiles allow the server to keep track of your preferences  e.g., to which of our e-newsletters you are subscribed and to which e-mail address they should be sent.

An online profile allows you to log in and change preferences yourself, without needing to e-mail our customer support staff and wait for a reply.

With a profile, we can e-mail you updates on conversations you're following on AVweb. (This applies to sections like our blog comments.)

Your AVweb profile contains limited information about you (your e-mail address, logon password, and country of origin) which is required by certain features on AVweb (posting a Classified Ad, submitting a picture or video for publication, commenting on our blogs). As long as you're logged in, you can use these features with only a click of a mouse, instead of having to tell us where you're from and how to reach you every time you use one of these features.

Your registration provides us with anonymous information on how many people are using AVweb and where they come from. It also allows us to see which features are the most popular and which e-newsletters have the greatest circulation. This information is tremendously helpful when it comes to deciding what stays and what goes. (We can only provide as much content as we can afford!)

By the same token, your membership allows us to provide accurate demographics to our advertisers (and potential advertisers) about AVweb traffic. These numbers bring in ad revenue that pays for AVweb content, so  in a nutshell  registration helps keep AVweb free!

Just visit avweb.com/register. Choose your (free) e-newsletter subscriptions by checking the boxes next to each title, fill our some basic information in the blue sidebar (your name, e-mail address, and country of origin), and click the submit button.

You can reach the registration page from anywhere on AVweb by looking for the Register/Login button () in the upper right of all pages on AVweb.

Once you've registered, the AVweb server will send you an automated e-mail message.

Click on the My Account button () in the upper right of any page on AVweb, and you'll be taken to your Account Profile, where you can update your personal information, e-mail address, password, or e-newsletter subscriptions.

A cookie is a small text file stored on your computer's hard drive that tells the AVweb server you're logged in and should be given access to all our members-only content. It's perfectly harmless and merely keeps you from having to enter your login and password for every page where it's needed.

Our cookies are not session-specific and remain on your computer until you either (a) log out of AVweb using the Log Out option in the upper right of all AVweb pages or (b) empty all cookies from your browser. A new cookie will be created automatically when you log in again.

Our cookies do no gather any personal information, nor do they transfer any information about your computer or browsing to the AVweb server. All they do is provide you quick access to members-only areas of the site once you're logged in.

In an effort to make AVweb easy to use, our login cookies have no expiration date. This means that you can (in theory, at least) log in to AVweb once on your home computer and never have to retype your user name and password. This saves keystrokes, but keeping a single login cookie viable on your computer for long periods of time increases the chances of it going bad (and causing login problems). For that reason, we recommend that you periodically log out of AVweb and log back in.

If you remain logged on for six months or more on the same computer, you may experience trouble accessing members-only AVweb content. The most common symptom is getting a login page when you attempt to access members-only content, then finding yourself sent to the "Account Options" page (over and over) instead of being passed through to the content you wished to view.

If this happens to you, trying getting rid of the old cookie and getting a new (fresh) one from the server:

Log out of AVweb using the Log out option in the upper right corner of all pages.

Close and restart your browser. (Be sure the browser closes and doesn't merely minimize to your taskbar or system tray.)

Log back in to AVweb using the Register/Login button () in the upper right corner of all pages on the site.

If you still experience problems, try emptying all cookies from your browser and restarting your computer before logging back in to AVweb.

If you'd like to help us out, save the corrupt cookie to your desktop (before logging out of AVweb) and contact us. We'll provide an e-mail address where you can send the bad cookie as an attachment, and we'll do a postmortem on the file and try to improve the life expectancy of our AVweb cookies.

Because of caching and different login procedures, you may actually have several AVweb cookies. If so, feel free to send them all. (We'll sort them out.) You can find them by doing a search (Start Menu » Search in Windows) for *@www.avweb* (include the asterisks as wild card characters).

Your AVweb cookies should be named something like this:

[username]@www.avweb[instance#].txt

... where [username] is your AVweb user name and [instance#] is a whole number.

Have you ever wondered what happened to a beloved newsletter or mailing list that just stopped coming to your inbox? Chances are, you've gone looking for one in the past and found it stored away in your "SPAM" folder. Modern e-mail clients are very clever about detecting spam  and more protective of your time and privacy than ever before. Unfortunately, they're also more likely to mark messages that you actually want as "spam."

Most e-mail programs (called "e-mail clients") include a feature to prevent this. It's called a whitelist (or "safe list" or "allowed senders list"). You'll usually find this feature under the Tools, Options, or Settings menu of your e-mail client. Once you've located it, just add an e-mail address to the list, and your e-mail client will always allow e-mail from that address to come through your filters.

Most e-mail clients will allow you to enter entire domains to your whitelist by entering the domain name and the @ symbol: If you added @aol.com to your list, your e-mail client would allow any and all e-mail from people who have an @aol.com address.

To add AVweb mailings to your whitelist, enter these domains into your client:

@e.avflash.com@p.avflash.com

You may need to do this in your e-mail client and online with your e-mail provider. That is, you may need to whitelist AVweb in your local e-mail client (e.g., Outlook) and with your service provider (e.g., Comcast).

If you run firewall or security programs that check for malicious e-mail messages, you may also need to add these domains to their whitelists (if the programs will allow it).

Our mail server is a pretty smart machine. If you stop opening your mail for a while, it will determine your account has gone inactive and will stop sending e-mail to your address.

Before you do anything, take a moment to log in to AVweb. This will let our server know that your account is still active, and e-newsletter deliveries may resume.

If you don't receive our next round of e-newsletters, contact customer service (using the form in the blue sidebar on this page) adn ask one of our customer support team members to "reset your bounce count." This will freshen up your AVweb profile and make the server aware that you're missing our e-newsletters and would like them to resume.

Don't sign up for a new account using your same e-mail address. You'll just be notified that the address is already in use, or  if you provide the same password  you'll be logged in to AVweb with no changes made to your account.